Community Hackathon

The Community Hackathon is an energizing event that convenes a diverse array of local stakeholders to generate, prototype, and pitch solutions to a shared communal challenge. The methodology encourages collaboration and breaks down barriers, while fostering a creative and experimental environment. The result is a more connected community or organization, whose members design the programs and services they wish to see.

UpStart’s Community Hackathons are a partnership with the Covenant Foundation. Over the last year, we took the west coast by storm with Hackathons in Portland, San Diego, and Vancouver.

How Hackathons Work

Each Hackathon city has a host organization tasked with identifying the central challenge facing the local Jewish community. At the Hackathon, we facilitate a process through which community members form teams, generate ideas, and build prototypes of solutions to the challenge. The winning ideas, selected by a crowd-sourced vote and a panel of judges, receive seed funding and entrepreneurial coaching to test out the ideas with an experiment or pilot.